Optimisation isn’t just for nerds

It used to be the case that optimisation could only be carried out by a select few. These boffins needed to be analytical and logical, they needed a head for numbers. They needed to be a little nerdy about it. New tools — like Google Analytics and Optimise, Hotjar, and Crazy Egg — have changed that. Nowadays, everybody should be optimising their site. If you aren’t, you risk missing out on clients. It’s also worth bearing in mind that optimisation isn’t as expensive as you might think. In fact, you can start implementing these techniques with barely any budget at all. Put it this way: If you optimise your site and gain just one extra client, then all your optimisation has been worth it.

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Unleash your inner stalker

The first step when it comes to optimising your site is to understand how visitors are currently using it. That means you need to do a bit of snooping. There are a few ways you can go about this. We recommend using a mixture of all of them.‍

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Google Analytics

Everyone’s heard of Google Analytics. It’s basically the king of analysing how people find your site and what they do when they get there. It’s really easy to implement; you just place a little bit of tracking code into your site.

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You can then see all sorts of metrics. A good example is that you can see the proportion of people who visit your site on desktop or mobile. It stands to reason that if more people visit on mobile, you should focus your efforts on your mobile site.

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Another example is that you can see where visitors go after they get to your site. You can see the flow of traffic around your site. This is really useful. If a lot of people reach your home page and then leave, then you need to work on your home page. There are plenty of great resources on how to make the most of Google Analytics. Google have their own support docs, and then the likes of Moz will teach you the best practices.

Hotjar

Hotjar is a visual way of seeing how people use your site. It provides you with a heatmap, showing you where people are clicking or scrolling too. You can also view actual recordings of your visitors as they interact with your site. It’s not creepy, you’re not watching them in their offices. It’s anonymous and just the mouse movements and clicks. Hotjar gives you a great way of seeing how people engage with your site. If, for example, people aren’t scrolling very far down, then you need to improve your copy to hook them in.‍

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Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg offers similar features to Hotjar, including the heatmaps and screen recordings. It does offer a little more in the way of analytics as it enables you to see how clicks differ depending on how the visitor found your site. This means you can optimise depending on who you’re trying to target.

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Stop speaking, start tweaking

Once you have an idea of how visitors are using your site, it’s time to start making informed copy and design choices.

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We’re a copy agency, so we’re going to focus on that. You need to take your learnings from the tools we covered above, and then base your decisions on them.

Grab their attention

One learning you might have is that visitors are only sticking around for a short time before leaving. This will be evidenced by a short time on page and a high bounce rate. So, how do you fix it? The key is to work on your introductory copy, especially in your site’s hero section. You need that first header to hook the visitor in, and make them want to scroll down further and explore your site. A good way of doing this is to focus on the key benefit that your agency provides.

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Our tagline is “Clarity and copy that wins your agency clients.” As you can see, it clearly explains what you get when you work with us. It makes you want to learn more.

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Improve your Call to Action (CTA)

A common issue that agencies will see is that people only visit one page before they leave the site. Sometimes, this is because there isn’t any clear CTAs present. You need to think about what you want your visitors to do. If your aim is for people to head to your “Contact” page and fill out a form, then that’s where you need to direct them.

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The best approach is to keep CTAs to a minimum. If you provide people with lots of different options, then they won’t know what to do. The copy on your CTA should be clear and actionable. It should be specific.

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One of our CTAs, for example, is “See Blog Packages”. It contains a clear action so people know what will happen when they click. It’s also specific to a certain offering.

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Never stop testing

There’s no point in making all these changes to your copy if you don’t know whether they’re working. You need to test different bits of copy and see which is most effective. One of the easiest ways of doing this is to use Google Optimise.

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With Google Optimise, you can quickly A/B test different bits of copy or design. It’s as easy as adding new copy to an experiment. Barely any technical know-how is needed. Optimise will then show different copy to different people, and compare the results. You can then see which messaging is most effective, and decide which you want to have going forward.

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Final thoughts

Optimising your site is easier than ever. There are lots of tools you can use to make it hassle-free and efficient. If you’re still a little confused about how to do it, we offer ongoing site optimisation to make sure your copy’s converting as many clients as possible.